Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

As if he’s Never Thought his Neighbors were “Frednecks”...

In the mean time, Superfrenchie, a resident of suburban Washington DC, can’t, in his zealous pursuit of pity, figure out the difference between a nationality and a race. He seems to find greater enlightenment in a nation where, unless propagandized and suppressed, sports fans ‘monkey chant’.

The French and racism - This brings us to another observation. The French people of European descent, with the exception of those descended from recent intra-European immigration (mainly from Italy, Spain, Poland), have no practical experience of racism from the receiving end. Here, I must mention the recent formulation of “anti-white racism”, but just to say that it’s both an epiphenomenon and irrelevant to the issue at hand. This absence of personal experience regarding racism explains why stereotypes against black people are so handy for the French who discuss racism. More clearly: French experience as emitters of racism toward black people is used as a reference to understand the feelings elicited by French bashing. This might offend some people, but it’s not rocket science. We always use the known to figure out the unknown.

Which is puzzling when you’re atmospherically accusing people largely of European origin of ‘racism’, when in fact, they were pelted all of their lives with reasons to think that European arts, culture, style, etc., were to be admired. In fact, those non-Europeans who don’t see the incessant imposition of the message about “see, we’re übermenschen because of our [opinions of our own lifestyles/inanimate products we’re selling you/opinions of you.]”

Any nominally skilled speaker of the English language would allege bigotry, not racism, but even at that, it can hardly be called bigotry when most of them have come to this conclusion through interpersonal experience, often going back decades of pedantic repetition.

SF’s insane assertion comes from an even longer history of prejudice that he should not be under any illusions about. The Republic’s policy on the handing of race is sound and highly principled. Many in the public, even the ‘educated’ babbling away in the ‘society of debate’ leave a great deal to be desired. Not just in the fundamentally monolithic nature of taking up outlying opinions, but within a bracket, for the sake of attention-seeking, but the underlying cultural habit of seeing nations as predictable entities comprising something-like-race and the treatment of their opinions of it with all the seriousness of a international sports league table.

Quite simply, that practice is a primitive thing for adults to engage in, yet those who do believe that they are illuminating us with their opinions based largely on an assumed image of a people-cum-race they like to opine about as a undifferentiated whole called “America”, or in the public’s gentle, infallible wisdom as ”les Ricains” or “les Amerloqs”, among other things as if their nation-state fixation wasn’t itself a form of bigotry with which they would like to write on your forehead.